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This first edition of Dnghu’s A Grammar of Modern Indo-European,
is a renewed effort to systematize the reconstructed phonology and morphology
of the Proto-Indo-European language into a modern European language, after the free
online publication of Europaio: A
Brief Grammar of the European Language in 2006.

Modern Indo-European is, unlike Latin,
Germanic or Slavic, common to most Europeans, and not only to some of them.
Unlike Lingua Ignota, Solresol, Volapük, Esperanto, Quenya, Klingon, Lojban and
the thousand invented languages which have been created since humans are able
to speak, Proto-Indo-European is natural, i.e. it evolved from an older
language – Middle PIE or IE II, of which we have some basic knowledge –, and is
believed to have been spoken by prehistoric communities at some time roughly between
3000 and 2500 BC, having itself evolved into different dialects by 2500 BC –
spoken until the split up of proto-languages in 2000 BC –, either from IE IIIa,
like Proto-Greek and Proto-Indo-Iranian, or from IE IIIb, like Europe’s
Indo-European.

Proto-Indo-European has been reconstructed in
the past two centuries (more or less successfully) by hundreds of linguists,
having obtained a rough phonological, morphological, and syntactical system,
equivalent to what Jews had of Old Hebrew before reconstructing a system for
its modern use in Israel. Instead of some inscriptions and oral transmitted
tales for the language to be revived, we have a complete reconstructed
grammatical system, as well as hundreds of living languages to be used as
examples to revive a common Modern Indo-European.

This grammar still focuses on the European
Union – and thus the main Proto-Indo-European dialect of Europe, Europe’s Indo-European –, although it
remains clearly usable as a basic approach for the other known PIE dialects
spoken at the time, like Proto-Anatolian for Turkey, Proto-Greek for Greece and
Proto-Indo-Iranian for Western and Southern Asia, respectively. In this sense, Proto-European
might be the best lingua franca for
the Americas, while Proto-Aryan is probably the best for Asia.

The former
Dean of the University of Huelva, Classical Languages’ philologist and Latin
expert, considers the Proto-Indo-European language reconstruction an invention;
Spanish Indo-Europeanist Bernabé has left its work on IE studies to dedicate
himself to “something more serious”; Francisco Villar, professor of Greek and
Latin at the University of Salamanca, deems a complete reconstruction of PIE
impossible; his opinion is not rare, since he supports the glottalic theory,
the Armenian Homeland hypothesis, and also the use of Latin instead of English
within the EU. The work of Elst, Talageri and others defending the ‘Indigenous
Indo-Aryan’ viewpoint by N. Kazanas, and their support of an unreconstructible
and hypothetical PIE nearest to Vedic Sanskrit opens still more the gap between
the mainstream reconstruction and minority views supported by nationalist
positions. Also, among convinced Indo-Europeanists, there seems to be no possible
consensus between the different ‘schools’ as to whether PIE distinguished
between ŏ and ă (as Gk., Lat. or Cel.) or if
those vowels were all initial ă,
as in the other attested dialects (Villar), or if the Preterites were only one
tense (as Latin praeteritum) with
different formations, or if there were actually an Aorist and a Perfect.

Furthermore,
José Antonio Pascual, a member of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE), considers
that “it is not necessary to be a great sociologist to know that 500 million
people won’t agree to adopt Modern Indo-European in the EU” (Spa. journal El Mundo, 8th April 2007). Of
course not, as they won’t agree on any possible question – not even on using
English, which we use in fact –, and still the national and EU’s Institutions
work, adopting decisions by majorities, not awaiting consensus for any
question. And it was probably not necessary to be a great sociologist a hundred
years ago to see e.g. that the revival of Hebrew under a modern language system
(an “invention” then) was a utopia, and that Esperanto, the ‘easy’ and ‘neutral’
IAL, was going to succeed by their first World Congress in 1905.

Such learned
opinions are only that, opinions, just as if Hebrew and Semitic experts had
been questioned a hundred years ago about a possible revival of Biblical Hebrew
in a hypothetic new Israel.

Whether MIE’s
success is more or less probable (and why) is not really important for our
current work, but a hypothesis which might be dealt with by sociology,
anthropology, political science, economics and even psychology, not to talk
about chance. Whether the different existing social movements, such as Pan-Latinism,
Pan-Americanism, Pan-Sanskritism, Pan-Arabism, Pan-Iranism, Pan-Slavism,
Pan-Hispanism, Francophonie,
Anglospherism, Atlanticism, and the hundred different pan-nationalist positions
held by different sectors of societies – as well as the different groups
supporting anti-globalization, anti-neoliberalism, anti-capitalism, anti-communism,
anti-occidentalism, etc. – will accept or reject this project remains unclear.

What we do
know now is that the idea of reviving Europe’s Indo-European as a modern
language for Europe and international organizations is not madness, that it is
not something new, that it doesn’t mean a revolution – as the use of Spanglish,
Syndarin or Interlingua – nor an involution – as regionalism, nationalism, or
the come back to French, German or Latin predominance –, but merely one of the
many different ways in which the European Union linguistic policy could evolve,
and maybe one way to unite different peoples from different cultures, languages
and religions (from the Americas to East Asia) for the sake of stable means of
communication. Just that tiny possibility is enough for us to “lose” some years
trying to give our best making the main Proto-Indo-European dialects as usable and
as known as possible.

According to Dutch
sociologist Abram de Swaan, every language in the world fits into one of four
categories according to the ways it enters into (what he calls) the global
language system.

•Central:
About a hundred languages in the world belong here, widely used and comprising
about 95% of humankind.

•Supercentral:
Each of these serves to connect speakers of central languages. There are only
twelve supercentral languages, and they are Arabic, Chinese, English, French,
German, Hindi, Japanese, Malay, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swahili.

•Hypercentral:
The lone hypercentral language at present is English. It not only connects
central languages (which is why it is on the previous level) but serves to
connect supercentral languages as well. Both Spanish and Russian are
supercentral languages used by speakers of many languages, but when a Spaniard
and a Russian want to communicate, they will usually do it in English.

•Peripheral:
All the thousands of other languages on the globe occupy a peripheral position
because they are hardly or not at all used to connect any other languages. In
other words, they are mostly not perceived as useful in a multilingual
situation and therefore not worth anyone’s effort to learn.

De Swaan
points out that the admission of new member states to the European Union brings
with it the addition of more languages, making the polyglot identity of the EU
ever more unwieldy and expensive. On the other hand, it is clearly politically
impossible to settle on a single language for all the EU’s institutions. It has
proved easier for the EU to agree on a common currency than a common language.

Of the EU’s
current languages, at least 14 are what we might call a ‘robust’ language,
whose speakers are hardly likely to surrender its rights. Five of them
(English, French, German, Portuguese and Spanish) are supercentral languages
that are already widely used in international communication, and the rest are
all central.

In the
ongoing activity of the EU’s institutions, there are inevitably shortcuts taken
- English, French and German are widely used as ‘working languages’ for
informal discussions. But at the formal level all the EU’s official languages (i.e.
the language of each member state) are declared equal.

Using all
these languages is very expensive and highly inefficient. There are now 23
official languages: Bulgarian, Czech,
Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish
Gaelic, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak,
Slovene, Spanish and Swedish, and three semiofficial (?): Catalan,
Basque and Galician. This means that all official documents must
be translated into all the members’ recognized languages, and representatives
of each member state have a right to expect a speech in their language to be
interpreted. And each member state has the right to hear ongoing proceedings
interpreted into its own language.

Since each of
the twenty one languages needs to be interpreted/translated into all the rest
of the twenty, 23 x 22 (minus one, because a language doesn’t need to be
translated into itself) comes to a total of 506 combinations (not taking
on accound the ‘semiofficial’
languages). So interpreters/translators have to be found for ALL combinations.

In the old
Common Market days the costs of using the official languages Dutch, English, French,
and German could be borne, and interpreters and translators could be readily
found. But as each new member is admitted, the costs and practical difficulties
are rapidly becoming intolerably burdensome.

The crucial point here is that each time a
new language is added, the total number of combinations isn’t additive but
multiplies: 506 + one language is not 507 but 552, i.e. 24 x 23, since every
language has to be translated/interpreted into all the others (except itself).

It is not
hard to see that the celebration of linguistic diversity in the EU only lightly
disguises the logistical nightmare that is developing. The EU is now preparing
for more languages to come: Romanian and Bulgarian have been
recently added, with the incorporation of these two countries to the EU; Albanian,
Macedonian, Serbian, Bosnian
and Croatian (the three formerly known as Serbo-Croatian, but
further differentiated after the Yugoslavian wars)if they are admitted
to the EU as expected;and many other regional languages, following the
example of Irish Gaelic, and the three semi-official Spanish languages: Alsatian,
Breton, Corsican, Welsh, Luxemburgish and Sami are likely candidates to
follow, as well as Scottish Gaelic, Occitan, LowSaxon,
Venetian, Piedmontese, Ligurian, Emilian, Sardinian, Neapolitan,
Sicilian, Asturian, Aragonese,
Frisian, Kashubian, Romany, Rusin, and many others, depending on
the political pressure their speakers and cultural communities can put on EU
institutions. It will probably not be long before Turkish, and with it Kurdish (andpossibly Armenian,
Aramaic and Georgian too), or maybe Ukrainian,
Russian and Belarusian, are other official languages, not to talk about the eternal candidates’ languages, Norwegian (in at least two of its
language systems, Bokmål and Nynorsk), Icelandic, Romansh, Monegasque (Monaco)and Emilian-Romagnolo (San
Marino), and this could bring the number of EU languages over 40. The number of
possible combinations are at best above 1000, which doesn’t seem within the
reach of any organization, no matter how well-meaning.

Many EU
administrators feel that to a great extent this diversity can be canceled out
by ever-increasing reliance on the computer translation that is already in
heavy use. It is certainly true that if we couldn’t count on computers to do a
lot of the translation ‘heavy lifting’, even the most idealistic administrator
would never even dream of saddling an organization with an enterprise that
would quickly absorb a major part of its finances and energy. But no machine
has yet been invented or probably ever will be that is able to produce a
translation without, at the very least, a final editing by a human translator
or interpreter.

The rapidly
increasing profusion of languages in the EU is quickly becoming intolerably
clumsy and prohibitively expensive. And this doesn’t even count the additional
expense caused by printing in the Greek alphabet and soon in the Cyrillic
(Bulgarian and Serbian). Everyone agrees that all languages must have their ‘place
in the sun’ and their diversity celebrated. But common sense suggests that the
EU is going to be forced to settle on a very small number of working languages,
perhaps only one, and the linguistic future of the EU has become the subject of
intense debate.

Only in
public numbers, the EU official translation/interpretation costs amount to more
than 1.230 M€, and it comes to more than 13% of today’s administrative
expenditure of the EU institutions. There are also indirect costs of linguistic
programmes aimed at promoting the learning of three or more languages since the
Year of Languages (2001), which also means hundreds of millions of Euros,
which haven’t been counted in the EU’s budget as linguistic expenditure, but
are usually included in budget sections such as Cohesion or Citizenship. It is
hard to imagine the huge amount of money (real or potential) lost by EU
citizens and companies each day because of communication problems, not only
because they can’t speak a third party’s language, but because they won’t
speak it, even if they can.

Preserving
the strict equality is the EU’s lifeblood, and it is a very disturbing thought
that the strongest candidate for a one-language EU is the one with an
established dominance in the world, English, which is actually only
spoken by a minority within Europe. Latin and Artificial languages (as
Esperanto, Ido or Interlingua) have been proposed as alternatives, but neither
the first, because it is only related to romance languages, nor the second,
because they are (too) artificial (invented by one person or a small group at
best), solve the linguistic theoretical problems, not to talk about the
practical ones.

The Indo-European
language that we present in this work, on the contrary, faces not only the
addressed theoretical problems - mainly related to cultural heritage and sociopolitical
proud - but brings also a practical solution for the European Union, without
which there can be no real integration. European nations are not prepared to
give up some of their powers to a greater political entity, unless they don’t
have to give up some fundamental rights. Among them, the linguistic ones have
proven harder to deal with than it initially expected, as they are raise very
strong national or regional feelings.

Indo-European is already the grandmother of the
majority of Europeans. The first language of more than 97% of EU citizens is
Indo-European, and the rest can generally speak at least one of them as second
language. Adopting Indo-European as the main official language for the EU will
not mean giving up linguistic rights, but enhancing them, as every other
official language will have then the same status under their common ancestor;
it won’t mean losing the own culture for the sake of unity, but recovering it
altogether for the same purpose; and, above all, it will not mean choosing a lingua
franca to communicate with foreigners within an international organization,
but accepting a National Language to communicate with other nationals within the
same country.

NOTE.
The above information is mainly copied
(literally, adjusted or modified) from two of Mr. William Z. Shetter Language Miniatures, which can be
found in his website:

This is A Grammar of Modern Indo-European,First Edition, with Modern
Indo-European Language Grammatical system in Pre-Version4, still in βeta phase –
i.e., still adjusting some important linguistic questions, and lots of minor
mistakes, thanks to the contributions of experts and readers.

NOTE. A version number
(N) is given to fullrevisions of the
grammar, and each minor correction published must be given a different number
to be later identified, usually ranging from N.01 to N.99. This book includes a full correction of version 3, but is
still Pre-Version 4, which means the correction was not
finished, and it its therefore still 3.xx. Full revisions are driven from beginning to end, so there
should be a comment marking the end of the revised material. Since version 3.8x
that note is already in the Etymological Notes section.

“Europe’s
Indo-European” version 4 continues “Modern
Indo-European” version 3 (first printed edition, since June 2007), and this
in turn version 2, which began in March 2007, changing most features of the old
“Europaio”/“Sindhueuropaiom” concept of version 1 (Europaio: A Brief Grammar of the European Language, 2005-2006), in
some cases coming back to features of Indo-European
0.x (2004-2005).

1. The artificial distinction in “Europaiom” and “Sindhueuropaiom”
systems (each based on different dialectal features) brings more headaches than
advantages to our Proto-Indo-European revival project; from now on, only a unified
“Modern Indo-European”, based on
Europe’s Indo-European (or Proto-European)
is promoted. “Sindhueuropaiom” (i.e.
Proto-Indo-European) became thus a theoretical project for using the phonetical
reconstructions of Late PIE.

2. Unlike the first simplified Europaio grammar, this one goes deep into the roots of the specific
Indo-European words and forms chosen for the modern language. Instead of just
showing the final output, expecting readers to accept the supposed research
behind the selections, we let them explore the details of our choices – and
sometimes the specifics of the linguistic reconstruction –, thus sacrificing
simplicity for the sake of thorough approach to modern IE vocabulary.

3. The old Latin-only alphabet has been expanded to
include Greek and Cyrillic writing systems, as well as a stub of possible
Armenian, Arabo-Persian and Devanagari (abugida) systems. The objective is not
to define them completely (as with the Latin alphabet), but merely to show
other possible writing systems for Modern Indo-European, Modern Anatolian,
Modern Aryan, and Modern Hellenic.

4. The traditional phonetic distinction of palatovelars was
reintroduced for a more accurate phonetic reconstruction of Late PIE, because
of the opposition found (especially among Balto-Slavic experts) against our
simplified writing system. Whether satemization was a dialectal and
phonological trend restricted to some phonetic environments (PIE k-
before some sounds, as with Latin c-
before -e and -i), seemed to us not so important as the fact that more people feel
comfortable with an exact – although more difficult – phonetic reconstruction. From versions 3.xx
onwards, however, a more exact reconstruction is looked for, and therefore a
proper explanation of velars and vocalism (hence also laryngeals) is added at
the end of this book – coming back, then, to a simplified writing system.

4. The historically alternating Oblique cases Dative, Locative, Instrumental and Ablative, were shown on a declension-by-declension (and
even pronoun-by-pronoun) basis, as Late PIE shows in some declensions a
simpler, thus more archaic, reconstructible paradigm (as i,u) while others (as the
thematic e/o) show almost the same Late PIE pattern of four differentiated
oblique case-endings. Now, the 8 cases traditionally reconstructed are usable –
and its differentiation recommended – in MIE.

The classification of Modern Indo-European nominal
declensions has been reorganized to adapt it to a more Classic pattern, to help
the reader clearly identify their correspondence to the different Greek and
Latin declension paradigms.

5. The verbal system has been reduced to the
reconstructed essentials of Late Proto-Indo-European conjugation and of its
early dialects. Whether such a simple and irregular system is usable as is,
without further systematization, is a matter to be solved by Modern
Indo-European speakers.

The so-called Augment in é-, attested almost only
in Greek, Indo-Iranian and Armenian, is sometimes left due to
Proto-Indo-European tradition, although recent research shows that it was
neither obligatory, nor general in Late PIE. It is believed today that it was
just a prefix with a great success in the southern dialects, as per- (<PIE per-) in Latin or ga- (<PIE
ko-) in Germanic.

6. The syntactical framework of Proto-Indo-European has
been dealt with extensively by some authors, but, as the material hasn’t still
been summed up and corrected by other authors (who usually prefer the
phonological or morphological reconstruction), we use literal paragraphs from
possibly the most thorough work available on PIE syntax, Winfred P. Lehman’s Proto-Indo-European
Syntax (1974), along with some comments and corrections
made since its publication by other scholars.

To Mayte, my
best friend, for her support and encouragement before I worked on this project,
even before she knew what was it all about. For the money and time spent in
lunchtimes, books, websites, servers and material. For her excitement when
talking about the changes that Proto-Indo-European revival could bring to the
world’s future. Thank you.

To Fernando
López-Menchero, Civil Engineer and Classic Languages’ Philologist, expert in
Indo-European linguistics, for his invaluable help, revision and corrections.
Without his unending contributions and knowledge, this grammar wouldn’t have shown
a correct Proto-Indo-European reconstruction. Sorry for not correcting all
mistakes before this first edition.

To Prof. Dr.
Luis Fernando de la Macorra, expert in Interregional Economics, and Prof. Dr.
Antonio Muñoz, Vice-Dean of Academic Affairs in the Faculty of Library Science,
for their support in the University Competition and afterwards.

To D.Phil.
Neil Vermeulen, and English Philologist Fátima Batalla, for their support to
our revival project within the Dnghu Association.

To the
University of Extremadura and the Cabinet of Young Initiative, for their prize
in the Entrepreneurial Competition in Imagination Society (2006) and their
continuated encouragement.

To the
Department of Classical Antiquity of the UEx, for their unconditional support
to the project.

To the
Regional Government of Extremadura and its public institutions, for their open
support to the Proto-Indo-European language revival.

To the
Government of Spain and the President’s cabinet, for encouraging us in our
task.

To Manuel
Romero from Imcrea.com Diseño Editorial,
for his help with the design and editorial management of this first printed
edition.

To all
professors and members of public and private institutions who have shared with
us their constructive criticisms, about the political and linguistic aspects of
PIE’s revival.

To Europa Press, RNE, El Periódico Extremadura,
Terra, El Diario de Navarra, and other Media, and especially to EFE, Hoy, El
Mundo, TVE, TVE2, RTVExtremadura for their extensive articles and reports about
Modern Indo-European.

We thank
especially all our readers and contributors.Thank you for your emails and comments.

1. “Modern
Indo-European” or MIE: To avoid some past mistakes, we use the term Europaiom only to refer to the European language system, or to the
reconstructed Europe’s Indo-European
(EIE) proto-language. The suitable names for the simplified Indo-European
language system for Europe are thus European language or European, as well as “Europaio”.

2. The roots
of the reconstructed Middle PIE language (PIH) are basic morphemes
carrying a lexical meaning. By addition of suffixes, they form stems, and by
addition of desinences, these form grammatically inflected words (nouns or
verbs).

NOTE. PIE reconstructed roots are subject to ablaut,
and except for a very few cases, such ultimate roots are fully characterized by
its constituent consonants, while the vowel may alternate. PIH roots as
a rule have a single syllabic core, and by ablaut may either be monosyllabic or
unsyllabic. PIH roots may be of the following form (where K is a voiceless
stop, G an unaspirated and Gh an aspirated stop, R a semivowel (r̥, l̥, m̥, n̥,
u̯,i̯)
and H a laryngeal (or s). After Meillet, impossible PIH combinations are
voiceless/aspirated (as in *teubh or *bheut),
as well as voiced/voiceless (as in *ged or *deg). The following
table depicts the general opinion:

A root has at least one consonant, for some at least two
(e.g. PIH h₁ek vs. EIE ek-,“quick”, which is the root for MIE adj. ōkús). Depending on the
interpretation of laryngeals, some roots seem to have an inherent a or o vowel, EIE ar
(vs. PIH h2ar-),
fit, EIE ongw
(vs. PIH h3engw)
“anoint”, EIE ak (vs. PIH
h2ek) “keen”.

By “root extension”, a basic CeC (with C being any consonant)
pattern may be extended to CeC-C, and an s-mobile may extend it to
s-CeC.

The total number of consonant, sonant and laryngeal elements
that appear in an ordinary syllable are three – i.e., as the triliteral Semitic
pattern. Those which have less than three are called ‘Concave’ verbs (cf. PIH Hes, Hei, gwem);
those extended are called ‘Convex’ verbs (cf. Lat. plangō, spargō,
frangō, etc., which, apart from the extension in -g, contain a laryngeal); for
more on this, vide infra on MIE Conjugations.

3. Verbs are
usually shown in notes without an appropriate verbal noun ending -m,
infinitive ending –tu/-ti, to distinguish them clearly from nouns and adjectives. They
aren’t shown inflected in 1st P.Sg. Present either – as they should
–, because of the same reason, and aren’t usually accented.

NOTE. Ultimate PIH reconstructed verbal roots are written
even without an athematic or thematic ending. When an older laryngeal appears,
as in PIH pelh2-,
it sometimes remain, as in EIE pela-,
or in case of ultimate roots with semivowel endings [i̯],
[u̯], followed by an
older laryngeal, they may be written with ending -j or -w.

4. Adjectives
are usually shown with an accented masculine (or general) ending -ós,
although sometimes a complete paradigm -ós, -, -óm, is written.

5. An acute
accentis written over the vowel or
semivowel in the stressed syllable,
except when stress is on the penult (one syllable before the last)
and in monosyllabic words. Accented long vowels and sonants are represented
with special characters. The weak vowel of a possible diphthong is also
accented; so in eími, I go, instead of eimi, which would be read usually as *éimi if left unaccented.

6. For zero-grade or zero-ending, the symbol Ø is sometimes used.

7.
Proto-Indo-European vowel apophony or Ablaut is indeed
normal in MIE, but different dialectal Ablauts are corrected when
loan-translated. Examples of these are kombhastós,
from Lat. confessus (cf. Lat. fassussum), from EIE bhā-; EIE dhaklís/disdhaklís,
as Lat. facilis/difficilis, from PIE dhē-; MIE saliō/ensaliō/ensaltō, as Lat. saliō/insiliō/insultō, etc.

NOTE.SuchAblaut is linked to languages with
musical accent, as Latin. In Italic, the tone was always on the first syllable;
Latin reorganized this system, and after Roman grammarians’ “penultimate rule”,
Classic Latin accent felt on the penultimate syllable if long, on the
antepenultimate if short (hence Lat. pudícus but módicus), thus
triggering off different inner vocalic timbres or Ablauts. Other Italic
dialects, as Oscan or Umbrian, didn’t suffered such apophony; cf. Osc. anterstataí
, Lat. interstitae; Umb. antakres, Lat. integris; Umb. procanurent,
Lat. procinuerint, etc. Germanic also knew such tone variations. For
more on this topic, see phonotactic development in Latin at <http://www.cunyphonologyforum.net/SYLLPAPERS/Senhandoutnew.pdf>.

8. In
Germanic, Celtic and Italic dialects the IE intervocalic -s- becomes voiced, and
then it is pronounced as the trilled consonant, a phenomenon known as Rhotacism; as with zero-grade kṛs [kr̥s] from EIE stem kers-, run, giving ‘s-derivatives’ O.N. horskr, Gk. -κουρος, and ‘r-derivatives’ as MIE kŕsos, wagon, cart, from Celtic
(cf. Gaul. karros, O.Ir., M.Welsh carr, into Lat. carrus) and kŕsō,
run, cf. Lat. currō. In light of Greek forms as criterion, monastery, etc., the suffix to indicate “place where” (and
sometimes instrument) had an original IE r,
and its reconstruction as PIE s is
wrong.

9. Some loans are left as they are, without necessarily implying that
they are original Indo-European forms; as Latin mappa, “map”, aiqi-, “aequi-“, Celtic pen-, “head”, Greek sphaira, “sphere”, Germanic
iso-, “ice”, and so on. Some forms are already subject to change in MIE
for a more ‘purist’ approach to a common EIE, as ati- for Lat. re-, -ti for (Ita. and Arm.)
secondary -tiō(n), etc.

10. In
Romance languages, Theme is used instead of Stem. Therefore, Theme
Vowel and Thematic refer to the Stem endings, usually to the e/o
endings. In the Indo-European languages,
Thematic roots are those
roots that have a “theme vowel”; a
vowel sound that is always present between the root of the word and the
attached inflections. Athematic
roots lack a theme vowel, and attach their inflections directly to the root
itself.

NOTE. The distinction between thematic and athematic roots is
especially apparent in the Greek verb; they fall into two classes that are
marked by quite different personal endings. Thematic verbs are also called -ω
(-ô) verbs in Greek; athematic verbs are -μι (-mi)
verbs, after the first person singular present tense ending that each of them
uses. The entire conjugation seems to differ quite markedly between the two
sets of verbs, but the differences are really the result of the thematic vowel
reacting with the verb endings. In Greek, athematic verbs are a closed class of
inherited forms from the parent IE language. Marked contrasts between thematic
and athematic forms also appear in Lithuanian, Sanskrit, and Old Church
Slavonic. In Latin, almost all verbs are thematic; a handful of surviving
athematic forms exist, but they are considered irregular verbs.

The thematic and athematic distinction also applies to nouns;
many of the old IE languages distinguish between “vowel stems” and “consonant
stems” in the declension of nouns. In Latin, the first, second, fourth, and
fifth declensions are vowel stems characterized by a, o, u
and e, respectively; the third declension contains both consonant stems
and i stems, whose declensions came to closely resemble one another in
Latin. Greek, Sanskrit, and other older IE languages also distinguish between
vowel and consonant stems, as did Old English.

NOTE. It has been proposed an earlier TT→TsT (where T = dental stop), i.e. that
the cluster of two dental stops had a dental fricative s inserted between them. It is based on some findings in Hittite,
where cluster tst is spelled as z (pronounced as ts), as
in PIH h1ed-ti, “he eats” → *h1etsti→ Hitt. ezzi. Confirmation
from early intermediate and common (Late PIE) -st- are found e.g. in O.Ind. mastis, “measure”, from
*med-tis, or Av. -hasta-, from *sed-tós. This evolution was probably overshadowed by other Aryan
developments, see Appendix II.

12. PIE made
personal forms of composed verbs separating the root from the so-called ‘prepositions’,
which were actually particles which delimited the meaning of the sentence.
Thus, a sentence like Lat. uos supplico
is in PIE as in O.Lat. sub uos placo.
The same happened in Homeric Greek, in Hittite, in the oldest Vedic and in
modern German ‘trennbare Verben’.
Therefore, when we reconstruct a verb like accept,
MIE inf. adkēptātus, it doesn’t mean it should be used as in
Classic Latin (in fact its ablaut has been reversed), or indeed as in Modern English,
but with its oldest use: kēptāiō ad, I
accept.

13. Reasons
for not including the palatovelars in MIE writing system are 1) that, although
possible, their existence is not
sufficiently proven (see Appendix II.2); 2) that their writing because of
tradition or ‘etymology’ is not justified, as this would mean a projective
writing (i.e., like writing Lat. casa,
but Lat. ĉentum, because the k-sound before -e
and -i evolves differently in
Romance). The pairs ģ Ģ and ķ Ķ, have been proposed to write
them, for those willing to differentiate their pronunciation.

In dark,
countries with a majority of Indo-European speakers; in light color, countries with
Indo-European-speaking minorities.

1.1.1. The
Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred languages and dialects,
including most of the major languages of Europe, as well as many in Asia.
Contemporary languages in this family include English, German, French, Spanish,
Portuguese, Hindustani (i.e., Hindi and Urdu among other modern dialects), Persian
and Russian. It is the largest family of languages in the world today, being
spoken by approximately half the world’s population as first language.
Furthermore, the majority of the other half speaks at least one of them as
second language.

1.1.2. Romans
didn’t perceive similarities between Latin and Celtic dialects, but they found
obvious correspondences with Greek. After Roman Grammarian Sextus Pompeius
Festus:

Such findings
are not striking, though, as Rome was believed to have been originally funded
by Trojan hero Aeneas and, consequently, Latin was derived from Old Greek.

1.1.3. Florentine
merchant Filippo Sassetti travelled to the Indian subcontinent, and was among
the first European observers to study the ancient Indian language, Sanskrit.
Writing in 1585, he noted some word similarities between Sanskrit and Italian,
e.g. deva/dio, “God”, sarpa/serpe,
“snake”, sapta/sette, “seven”, ashta/otto, “eight”, nava/nove, “nine”. This observation is today
credited to have foreshadowed the later discovery of the Indo-European language
family.

1.1.4. The
first proposal of the possibility of a common origin for some of these
languages came from Dutch linguist and scholar Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn in
1647. He discovered the similarities among Indo-European languages, and
supposed the existence of a primitive common language which he called “Scythian”.
He included in his hypothesis Dutch, Greek, Latin, Persian, and German, adding later
Slavic, Celtic and Baltic languages. He excluded languages such as Hebrew from
his hypothesis. However, the suggestions of van Boxhorn did not become widely
known and did not stimulate further research.

1.1.5. On 1686, German linguist Andreas Jäger published De Lingua Vetustissima Europae, where he
identified an remote language, possibly spreading from the Caucasus, from which
Latin, Greek, Slavic, ‘Scythian’ (i.e., Persian) and Celtic (or ‘Celto-Germanic’)
were derived, namely Scytho-Celtic.

1.1.6. The hypothesis re-appeared in 1786 when Sir William
Jones first lectured on similarities between four of the oldest languages known
in his time: Latin, Greek, Sanskrit and Persian:

“The
Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more
perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely
refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of
grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong
indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them
to have sprung from some common source,
which, perhaps, no longer exists: there is a similar reason, though not quite
so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothicand the Celtic, though
blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanskrit; and
the old Persian might be added to the same family”

1.1.7. Danish Scholar Rasmus Rask was the first to point out
the connection between Old Norwegian and Gothic on the one hand, and
Lithuanian, Slavonic, Greek and Latin on the other. Systematic comparison of
these and other old languages conducted by the young German linguist Franz Bopp
supported the theory, and his Comparative Grammar, appearing between
1833 and 1852, counts as the starting-point of Indo-European studies as an
academic discipline.

1.1.8. The classification of modern Indo-European dialects
into ‘languages’ and ‘dialects’ is controversial, as it
depends on many factors, such as the pure linguistic ones – most of the times
being the least important of them –, and also social, economic, political and
historical considerations. However, there are certain common ancestors, and some
of them are old well-attested languages (or language systems), such as Classic
Latin for modern Romance languages – French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian
or Catalan –, Classic Sanskrit for some modern Indo-Aryan languages, or Classic
Greek for Modern Greek.

Furthermore, there are some still older IE ‘dialects’, from which these old formal
languages were derived and later systematized. They are, following the above
examples, Archaic or OldLatin,
Archaic or VedicSanskrit and Archaic or OldGreek, attested in
older compositions, inscriptions and inferred through the study of oral
traditions and texts.

And there are also some old related dialects, which help us
reconstruct proto-languages, such as Faliscan for Latino-Faliscan (and with Osco-Umbrian for an older Proto-Italic), the Avestan language for
a Proto-Indo-Iranian or Mycenaean for
an older Proto-Greek.

NOTE.Although proto-language groupings for early Indo-European
languages may vary depending on different criteria, they all have the same
common origin, the Proto-Indo-European language, which is generally easier to
reconstruct than its dialectal groupings. For example, if we had only some
texts of Old French, Old Spanish and Old Portuguese, Mediaeval Italian and
Modern Romanian and Catalan, then Vulgar Latin – i.e. the features of the
common language spoken by all of them, not the older, artificial, literary
Classical Latin – could be easily reconstructed, but the groupings of the
derived dialects not. In fact, the actual groupings of the Romance languages
are controversial, even knowing well enough Archaic, Classic and Vulgar
Latin...

Distribution of language families
in the 20th century.

1.2.1. In the
beginnings of the Indo-European or Indo-Germanic studies using the comparative
grammar, the Indo-European proto-language was reconstructed as a unitary
language. For Rask, Bopp and other Indo-European scholars, it was a search for the
Indo-European. Such a language was supposedly spoken in a certain region
between Europe and Asia and at one point in time – between ten thousand and four
thousand years ago, depending on the individual theories –, and it spread
thereafter and evolved into different languages which in turn had different
dialects.

1.2.2. The Stammbaumtheorie or Genealogical Tree
Theory states that languages split up in other languages, each of them in turn
split up in others, and so on, like the branches of a tree. For example, a well
known old theory about Indo-European is that, from the Indo-European
language, two main groups of dialects known as Centum and Satem
separated – so called because of their pronunciation of the gutturals in Latin
and Avestan, as in PIE km̥tóm,
“hundred”. From these
groups others split up, as Centum
Proto-Germanic, Proto-Italic or Proto-Celtic, and Satem Proto-Balto-Slavic, Proto-Indo-Iranian, which developed into
present-day Germanic, Romance and Celtic, Baltic, Slavic, Iranian and
Indo-Aryan languages.

Modern tree
diagram of the IE languages by Eric Hamp (1990).

NOTE. The Centum and
Satem isogloss is one of the oldest known phonological differences of Indo-European
languages, and is still used by many to classify them in two groups, thus
disregarding their relevant morphological and syntactical differences. It is
based on a simple vocabulary comparison; as, from PIE km̥tóm (possibly earlier *dkm̥tóm, from dekm̥, “ten”), Satem: O.Ind. śatám,
Av. satəm, Lith. šimtas,
O.C.S. sto, or Centum: Gk. ἑκατόν,
Lat. centum, Goth. hund, O.Ir. cet, etc.

1.2.3. The Wellentheorie or Waves Theory, of J.
Schmidt, states that one language is created from another by the spread of
innovations, the way water waves spread when a stone hits the water surface.
The lines that define the extension of the innovations are called isoglosses.
The convergence of different isoglosses over a common territory signals the
existence of a new language or dialect. Where isoglosses from different
languages coincide, transition zones are formed.

“Wave model” of
some of the interrelationships of the Indo-European languages, J.P.Mallory
and D.Q. Adams.